19-Nov-09 3:00 AM AWST

What's up with RFID in China?

According to James Maclean, an old hand in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) circles who now consults to the industry, "The RFID market principally in Europe and North America, and the emerging markets in Asia, to date, has struggled to reach large scale adoption for reasons of a common standard, product performance, costs and benefits over existing methodologies." Speaking at a Council workgroup in September, Maclean gave an update to the group on improvements in RFID solutions designed for supply chain management.

"If you look at the history of RFID tags," said Maclean, "One of the expectations that came out was that RFID tags would be very low cost, which hurt RFID all the way through." Past problems include a lack of materials and standards. An accepted standard was finally passed in April 2005, which covers the way data is formatted and presented. "In the past, there were problems with readers operating in close proximity," he said.

Since 2005, many of the issues that have plagued RFID applications have been overcome, but there is still obviously room to improve and to apply RFID more widely across every part of the supply chain. Change has been driven by the endusers of the technology, such as Metro, who have demanded that readers and antenna companies improve their technology so that readers will be able to read multiple tags, Maclean told the group. "Projects failed in the past because of the higher cost and range of tags."

Metro has demanded a reliability figure of 98 percent such as Intermec, Sirit and Avery Denison. In tests that Metro has done on pallet tagging in their "Future Store," a facility designed to test for testing purposes, Metro was able to tag 99 percent of their products, Maclean said.

As the range of technology continues to improve with Bi-directional phased array (BIFAR) and radar used more widely to do things such as manage inventory and plan store layouts, more widespread usage should occur. "The new innovations will help prevent shrinkage and bring much wider use for the tags," Maclean noted. RFID usage in China is also on the rise, as the Chinese government uses the technology more frequently in an attempt to comply with Western companies who need their products tagged. The government's next five year plan includes usage for RFID tags in areas such as automobile identification, vehicle plate management and other ways to manage the Chinese populace such as in ID cards. Given China's fast growing consumer market, we expect to hear a lot more about RFID in coming years.

Click a star to rate!

Rating: 0.00 / 5.00 - Not yet rated.
0 ratings